Mazda
The Rubber Hits the Road with Mazda Canada Inc.'s Enterprise Solution from Microsoft
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Company Overview
In 1968, Mazda Canada Inc. (Mazda), a subsidiary of Mazda Motor Corporation of Hiroshima, Japan, introduced its first car to Canada. Headquartered in Scarborough, with two regional offices in Montreal and Vancouver, Mazda supports its 150 independently owned and franchised dealerships with sales and marketing, customer service and parts for Mazda vehicles. At the heart of Mazda lays the unique manufacturing philosophy of Kansei Engineering that factors human thoughts, feelings and emotions into the car design process. Once the cars are made, Mazda's winning combination of a connected dealer network and outstanding owner service continues to generate satisfied Canadian drivers 69,000 of them last year alone.
Business Challenge
The need for change was clear and the directive came straight from the President of Mazda Canada. The company's newly created eTaskforce was responsible for rolling out the eBusiness directive the foundation of which was the Web site. Before the Microsoft-based solution, the former Mazda Web site was a small, static UNIX-based site with little character and totaled only 35 pages. With both dealers and consumers sharing the driver's seat to success, Mazda had two challenges to solve. On the business side of the equation, Mazda's goal was to strengthen relationships with each of its 150 dealerships by supporting them in all aspects from buying parts to promoting sales. For the end-customer and current Mazda owner, the company wanted to ensure it was not only communicating news clearly, but also increasing the value of customer-related information. If strategically planned and flawlessly executed, harnessing the power of the Internet would "leapfrog" Mazda past its competitors by offering intuitive tools to both dealers and customers. However, the first and immediate challenge was finding an experienced technology solution provider that would be able to create and deploy everything from code to creative for the largest Web initiative in Mazda Canada's history.
Solution
Mazda chose OnX Enterprise Solutions Inc. (OnX) as their Strategic Partner to provide a complete end-to-end solution. To meet the eBusiness needs of Mazda, a thirty-person OnX team geared-up to design, create, implement and host the solution that would touch every aspect of the Mazda enterprise. This multi-year undertaking would evolve throughout its implementation and grow from its initial 1.5 million dollar budget to a four million dollar success story. When OnX took over the existing Mazda site, the technology agnostic solution provider chose to pour the contents into a Microsoft-based environment. This move leveraged Microsoft's packaged technologies and ensured tight integration with Mazda Canada and its North American headquarters in Irvine, California in addition to the benefits of standardizing on one common platform.
Business Benefits
Approximately 70 per cent of the work revolved around the Business-to-Business (B2B) solutions. The B2B site for Mazda dealers or Dealers' Lounge, a portal for dealerships, seamlessly integrates dealers' home pages into the Mazda Web site. Accessible through a virtual private network (VPN), it is the administrative interface dealers use to update their site content. This content is dynamically generated from the SQL Server™ 2000 database when called by consumers using various Web search options on the Mazda corporate site (www.mazda.ca). One of the biggest challenges was integrating the 150 dealers' Web sites into one domain that would offer a single point of management for easy manageability by non-technical Mazda personnel. The concept and design of this dealer management system was an industry first and Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system and Active Directory directory service elegantly accomplished the task. These servers efficiently shared and managed information across network resources and users through a single consistent management interface, reducing both redundancy and maintenance costs. The second part of the B2B site, the Mazda Lounge, is where Mazda business managers can quickly set-up new dealers and specify which resources the dealer can use. Each Web option has a corresponding rule and a unique user function that are also set-up with Active Directory. "Active Directory's flexible and configurable hierarchy allowed us to optimize the organization of resources for usability and manageability," said Jian Huang, Practice Manager of Microsoft-Based Solutions for OnX. "Active Directory saved precious time in both the development and maintenance by enabling us to apply standardized business rules to Mazda's distributed applications and network resources, reducing administrators task of maintaining a variety of customized directories to just one," added Huang. Active Directory helps provide network security. In addition to the secure administrative interface provided by the VPN, Active Directory acts as the central authority for using enhanced network security, letting the operating system immediately verify a user's identity and control their access to network resources with the input of a single user name and password. Implementing an end-to-end solution from Microsoft helped ensure the solution was scaleable and available. The system architecture improvements inherent in Windows 2000 offer Mazda unbeatable server uptime, fault tolerant and redundant systems and online configuration and maintenance capabilities. "We are confident that regardless of traffic load from dealers and customers, our ability to scale out by distributing the data load across our Commerce, Web and SQL clustered servers will amply absorb any spikes and growth in Web traffic," stated Huang. Furthermore, once integrated into the solution, the performance exceeded the IT team's high expectations.
Accelerating Time To Market
The technology of Microsoft was key to providing a solution that was quick to market. Microsoft SQL Server 2000's rich XML and Internet standard support provided the ability to store and retrieve data in XML format with built-in stored procedures that were repurposed for many different applications. Other objects inherent in the Microsoft products could simply be plugged in where necessary rather than being rebuilt from scratch. For example, Active Data Objects (ADO) was used for the data access protocol to access the SQL Server database, providing consistent, fast access to data. After building a standard database call, generating other queries simply meant passing different parameters through and ADO would take care of the details such as generating the connections between the database and the Component Object Model (COM) objects. The Rapid Application Development (RAD) technology of Microsoft reduced development time by 30 per cent. "Because components of Visual Studio development system such as Visual SourceSafe version control system, Visual Basic development system and Visual InterDev web development system all tie into one environment, developing and testing took a fraction of the time," confirmed Huang.
Opening the Front Door For Customers
The B2C site is where consumers view Mazda corporate information, review the model lineup, configure a vehicle, activate the lease and finance calculator, locate a specific dealer and browse their home page. Exploding to more than 1000 pages from a mere 35 pages two years ago, the Web site now receives more than 4000 unique visitors daily. Upon completion of the B2C site, a customer survey of site visitors found overwhelming positive feedback. "Now our customers can find out everything they need to know about any of our vehicles before visiting a dealer," said Kathryn Alexander, IT eBusiness Consultant, Mazda Canada. "This new confidently educated consumer has directly resulted in significantly reduced call volumes for both Mazda customer service and our dealerships, creating a winning situation for everyone," added Alexander.
Shifting Gears to the Future
With the help of OnX and technology from Microsoft, Mazda plans to provide its customers with added online functionality and service through an Owners Lounge. This customer portal will allow owners of Mazda vehicles to manipulate, access and track specific vehicle information such as service information and booking service appointments. Farther down the road, in 2004, Mazda customers who log on to the site with their vehicle identification number will also be able to access additional functionality such as trip planning. Later this year Mazda is also transforming their dealer communication system by integrating dealers into Mazda's mainframe network. This two-way online communication system will be used for sharing corporate information as well as day-to-day functions such as registering and ordering vehicles and parts. With every new function added, the Mazda Web site continues to provide more and more opportunities for both dealers and customers. "I'm confident our unique Web site is not only allowing us to meet our president's mandate, but will also remain a favourite site for automobile dealers and customers," added Alexander.
